A week following last Thursday’s global strikes and protests in 230 cities, hundreds of workers at McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD) are planning to travel to this Thursday’s annual shareholders’ meeting in a suburb of Chicago to continue raising their calls for a $15 an hour wage and the right to form a union. The protesters expect more than 2,000 supporters to be present.

Hard numbers are unavailable for last week’s strikes and other job actions, but organizers expected thousands of some 4 million U.S. fast-food workers to participate. The global strike was organized by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations, a federation comprised of 396 trade unions in 126 countries representing 12 million workers.

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In its annual report for last year, McDonald’s suggested that a wage hike may be necessary as a result of continued pressure:

The impact on our margins of labor costs that we cannot offset through price increases, and the long-term trend toward higher wages and social expenses in both mature and developing markets, which may intensify with increasing public focus on matters of income inequality…

Because so many fast-food outlets are franchised, corporations sometimes try to pin wage issues on franchisees. But as someone once pointed out, the fast-food companies set wages by setting the cost of everything except wages.

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